Design and experiment of hyper-spectral polarization imaging system based on AOTF

In order to acquire the polarization characteristics of targets and backgrounds, a hyper-spectral polarization imaging system based on a non-collinear, acousto-optic tunable filter(AOTF) and a linear polarizer was designed in this paper. The paper began with an analysis of the equivalent relationship of the AOTF to describe the principle of polarization detection of this system. Appropriate parameters of hardware components were assigned reasonably later. Then, the hyper-spectral polarization experiment about the aluminium plate, which was coated with light green, dark green and khaki pigments, within meadow was conducted by using the imaging system proposed above. Moreover, the hyper-spectral intensity and polarization contrast characteristics of the target and natural background in the scene were deduced by processing the experiment data. The results indicate that the polarization characteristics of pigments are different from that of natural background. The detection means can be chosen reasonably to realize the effective and quick detection and recognition for targets under the mixed background at those wavelengths or wavebands with obvious polarization contrast characteristics.